Tim Pugh from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology gave this talk at the DDN User Group in Denver. “The Bureau of Meteorology, Australia’s national weather, climate and water agency, relies on DDN’s GRIDScaler Enterprise NAS storage appliance to handle its massive volumes of research data to deliver reliable forecasts, warnings, monitoring and advice spanning the Australian region and Antarctic territory.”

At SC17 in Denver, Cavium showcased a wide variety of ThunderX2 Arm-based server platforms for high performance computing. “ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. It is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards.”

“With the integration of Arm processors into our flagship Cray XC50 systems, we will offer our customers the world’s most flexible supercomputers,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “Adding Arm processors complements our system’s ability to support a variety of host processors, and gives customers a unique, leadership-class supercomputer for compute, simulation, big data analytics, and deep learning. Our software engineers built the industry’s best Arm toolset to maximize customer value from the system, which is representative of the R&D work we do every day to build on our leadership position in supercomputing.”

Today Shared Services Canada (SSC) dedicated a pair of Cray supercomputers in Quebec. The new HPC systems will be used by the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to improve the accuracy and timeliness of weather warnings and forecasts. “Accurate and timely weather forecasting helps us protect our homes and businesses in the face of extreme storms and tornadoes, which are getting worse due to climate change. By supporting quality weather forecasts and warnings, the new High Performance Computers will help protect Canadians for years to come.”

Today Cray announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure. Under the partnership agreement, Microsoft and Cray will jointly engage with customers to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale, seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud.

Phil Carns from Argonne gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. “Darshan is a scalable HPC I/O characterization tool. It captures an accurate but concise picture of application I/O behavior with minimum overhead. Darshan was originally developed on the IBM Blue Gene series of computers deployed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, but it is portable across a wide variety of platforms include the Cray XE6, Cray XC30, and Linux clusters. Darshan routinely instruments jobs using up to 786,432 compute cores on the Mira system at ALCF.”

A new peer-reviewed paper is reportedly causing a stir in the climatology community. “The best hope for reducing long-standing global climate model biases, is through increasing the resolution to the kilometer scale. Here we present results from an ultra-high resolution non-hydrostatic climate model for a near-global setup running on the full Piz Daint supercomputer on 4888 GPUs.”

Today the European PRACE initiative announced that 46 Awards from their recent 15th Call for Proposals total up to nearly 1.7 thousand million core hours. The 46 awarded projects are led by principal investigators from 12 different European countries. “Of local interest this time around, the awarded projects involve co-investigators from the USA (7) and Russia (2). All information and the abstracts of the projects awarded under the 15th PRACE Call for Proposals are now available online.”

Scott Parker gave this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. “Designed in collaboration with Intel and Cray, Theta is a 9.65-petaflops system based on the second-generation Intel Xeon Phi processor and Cray’s high-performance computing software stack. Capable of nearly 10 quadrillion calculations per second, Theta will enable researchers to break new ground in scientific investigations that range from modeling the inner workings of the brain to developing new materials for renewable energy applications.”

Tim Barr from Cray gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee. “Cray’s unique history in supercomputing and analytics has given us front-line experience in pushing the limits of CPU and GPU integration, network scale, tuning for analytics, and optimizing for both model and data parallelization. Particularly important to machine learning is our holistic approach to parallelism and performance, which includes extremely scalable compute, storage and analytics.”

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This paper is intended to inform technical and business readers with I/O-intensive computing environments about a new software solution that manages at-scale flash to eliminate file system bottlenecks and voids old rules for application I/O optimization. Download now to learn more.